My Fave Links

Bestkisses.com

Your Life In A KissBest Kisses is a unique user-generated kissing photo website promoting the power of love one kiss at a time. Send us your photo kisses, captions and love-notes. New photos post every Monday. It's simple! It's your life in a kiss.

cc

Disposable Time

I have started to ask myself three important questions — how much of my time today helped me develop spiritually? How much helped promote my creativity and how much time did I spend on reaching out to help others develop? The short answer amounts to about 25% or less of each day.

It's not a mistake that I've found myself dwelling somewhere in the middle part of my life — but it's only the middle if I actually live to be 108 years old. A more accurate guess means that I've passed the middle mark several years back.

If I'm going to double or triple that percentage when would be a good time to start? Which now leads me to the largest question of all — what exactly am I waiting for?

I've always been investing in the spiritual, the creative and into others. But now there's an urgency I'm feeling in my soul more than I've felt it ever before — like I'm awakening from a long mind numbing kind of sleep.

I'm marking it down by acknowledging that I must act now without delay. Without any regrets.

"Why is often an escape hatch for people who know what they should do, but fear doing it. The best answer for the stalling why is: Go. The opposite of why is now." - Seth Godin

Creativity is just a fancy 10 letter word that means producing something—it's simply the deliberate act of doing. To create something one must be willing to DO something.

The art of creating works that will inspire or leave a lasting impression is to keep doing it over and over again. That's why they call it work. Do what inspires you—the stuff that stirs the passion in your soul. More than likely it will have the same effect on someone else.

Getting started may just mean that you'll have to pretend to create good work until eventually you do. That's the perfect place to start. Emulate the work you love and create without boundaries. You can do anything, be anyone and say anything because you're safely covered in the magical cloak of obscurity.

Austin Kleon best expresses the idea of creatively winging it in his book "Steal Like An Artist" which I highly suggest you read. In fact, buy two copies and give one away to inspire a friend.

"Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they'll tell you the truth: They don't know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day." - Austin Kleon

So what is "the good stuff"? It's the work that inspires by causing someone to laugh out loud, to rethink their path or method, or create that feeling of childlike wonder. The good stuff can be described in any number of ways and through any number of mediums which includes the art of cooking.

Have you ever had a meal that has blown the taste buds right out of your head? I have. Especially in the south of Spain. It takes doing over and over. No matter what the medium, the end result is still the same. If it's something worth remarking about—that's what makes it remarkable work.

When I started creating my Zombie Wagon cartoons using index cards and crayons, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just laid off from my job as a Creative Director that I held for 10 years, so I did what anyone in my position would do— I started cartooning like my life depended on it.

I was wrestling with some pent-up emotions that I felt could best be expressed through characters that were not me. It was safe, I had a voice through my charcters—especially through the Zombies I created. They could speak for me.

Before I knew it I had drawn over 150 cartoon panels and I was framing the work for my first show inside a coffee shop where most of the art was originally created. The local newspaper even did a story about my work and I sold over a dozen pieces from what began as just a hobby— a fluke at best.

The idea of faking it until you make it definitely has merit. I'm still in the process of pretending that I'm a cartoonist. Nobody has dared to fight me on this one, especially since I'm still enjoying the benefits of obscurity. So I am exactly what I say I am.

"An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail." - Edwin Land

I'm encouraging you to go for it at full speed ahead—whatever it is that you have in your heart to create. Creativity is both a deliberate and senseless act converging together at exactly the same time.

The next New York Times best seller is trapped inside your head and I won't even try to imagine what you might be holding in your hands. But I can imagine that you're well aware of the fact that it's time for you to finally get going.

What's holding you back? Stop defending, start bending and get to the pretending. I'm betting that you'll eventually flop over into producing some truly remarkable work. We're all counting on it.

The sun coming up at the start of a new day was designed to bring hope that we can have a second chance. Not simply a second chance to get it right, it's much bigger than making up for errors we've made. Each new day offers us all a second chance to love deeper, to give of ourselves more and the chance to forgive those that have wounded us.

If you woke up today and knew it was possibly the last new dawn you would see, would you really squander that time trying to make up for mistakes? I know I wouldn't. I would make every attempt to express my love to those who matter most to me, I would want to free my friends and family from my unforgiveness and let them know that they are the most precious thing to me in this life.

I realized this morning that today really is my last dawn, unless I am so privileged to wake again tomorrow. But tomorrow is not guaranteed, because for all I know today is the only day I have left. This is it. I have to go now. There is so much love to be given on this brand new day.

It's Black Friday. So what? It's really like any other Friday when retailers put specific items on deep discount. The only difference is on Black Friday you must perform acts of long-suffering to obtain those deals starting at midnight. That sounds more like a retail addiction to me. Other than attending these events for the thrill and pure sport of it, like you would enjoy downhill skiing, I see little long term value for us common folk.

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." John Steinbeck

I will always be a recovering idea guy. Creative ideas are the life blood that keeps me forever young. The most difficult part of having new ideas is knowing which ones to cultivate and which ones should be pushed aside. I have learned through much experience that when you choose to pursue an idea, that idea becomes a project. It begins as a thought, morphs into a notion, quickly turns into a concept and then it's shaped into an idea. It's merely a blink and a nod before you'll find yourself nurturing a brand new project.

In order to grow any idea regardless if it's brilliant or not, it will take an extended investment of time. How much time depends upon your level of resource and enthusiasm. Trust me, at this point if you plan to develop your idea, by definition it now qualifies as a project.

The official start of Spring is March 21st opening the door for that much overdue spring cleaning. Spring cleaning can be a useful event if you know how focus your attention on the right things. The key to your success is having a solid plan. I have compiled seven practical tips to help you prioritize the important stuff in life. It's not an exhaustive list by any means, but it's a great starting place. My guess is anything beyond these seven are most likely garbage.

I wanted to send you a quick note to thank you for lunch yesterday. I so enjoyed our time together but it was too short. The baby is beautiful, you both seem so bonded and happy together. I wish I did not have to run off so fast and cut our day short. Such is life. I promise that I'll come by next Saturday leaving my day open so we can spend more time. It's been too long since we could just laugh together like that. See you next week.

We are living in a culture where entertainment is sought after like bars of gold. We so hunger for that fresh entertainment fix that we will even watch random nobodies on YouTube making an attempt to entertain, click after click. Most of the time they miss the mark. But when they hit that mark we pass it onto ten friends. Then we search for more. That's mind blowing!

David Lehre (who?) he made the "MySpace Movie" and now he's been picked up by FOX to make a TV show. Even 20/20 covered the story on David Lehre. Some of these vehicles of modern entertainment have had hundreds of thousands, even millions of hits. That's an insatiable hunger and a powerful message about our culture.

We are living in an era of information overload. Just check out Digg.com a few times a day and watch manic members posting news stories by the minute. It's obscene and obsessive all at once. Everything on Digg is submitted by the community.
After you submit content, other people read your submission and Digg
what they like best. Wow! It's a battle of the geeks for submissiondomination. There is also Delicious a social book-marking site where you can find the hottest bookmarks. I need that? Where is that beautiful golden thing called silence? Where is our time for quiet reflection? That perfect sunset. Where is that moment when... Wait a minute I gotta see this. Exactly!

On the other swing of the pendulum, so much time is spent on the web lost in mindless pockets of nothing-at-all. Just scrolling and scanning and clicking on links and lagging. Time is spent on a quest for answers, directions or simply shopping for more things to buy. Things to buy that will entertain us. Or just shopping on-line as a form of entertainment. Is this time well spent?

Kurt Cobain summed it up perfectly in his lyrics from "Smells Like Teen Spirit". "I feel stupid and contagious, here we are now entertain us." Too bad Kurt did not stick around long enough to see his words come to life in such a real and magnified way in our contagious, entertainment obsessed culture. STOP! Now click this link to return to the entertainment portion of this program. Exactly!

I’ve realized that our culture offers little practical training on how to spend our disposable time or how to invest it wisely to get the desired return. It was Ben Franklin that said; “lost time is never found again.” Or is it? Mr. Benjamin Franklin also said; “remember that time is money.” That quote in our modern culture has been shortened to “time is money.” Those of us that maintain a full time job know very well that we trade our time weekly in exchange for money. Some of us earn more money for less time and of course the opposite is true. I started thinking about my disposable time outside of my work hours. I hear so much talk about how we spend our disposable income, which means the amount of an individuals income that remains after the deduction of income taxes. This income is available to be "disposed of" as either spending or saving.

I have concluded that my disposable time is a valuable commodity, one that should be dispensed with deliberate care. How do you spend your disposable time? Do you spend it all in one place? How much time is saved for family and friends? How much time do you set aside for a short nap under the shade of a tree on a perfect summer afternoon? How much time is lost in passing from one event to the next? Are you just too busy all the time? Ben Franklin said; “take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.” Wow! All things? I think old Ben was a man keenly aware of time and how to spend it wisely. Take a moment of your time today and post a comment on how you choose to spend your disposable hours. More on this subject to follow.